Privacy policy
StillView collects no personal data and sends nothing off your Mac unless you ask it to. This page explains what that means for the app and for this website.
- No accountYou never sign in, and nothing identifies you.
- No analyticsThe app has no telemetry, crash reporter, or usage tracking.
- No network callsThe app makes none of its own, and photos leave only when you share them.
- Open sourceEvery claim on this page can be checked against the code.
Who this covers
StillView is a macOS image viewer built and published by Vinny Carpenter, an independent developer. In this policy, "I" and "me" mean Vinny Carpenter, and "you" means anyone who uses the app or visits this site.
The policy covers the StillView app from the Mac App Store and builds you compile yourself from the public source code. It also covers the website at stillviewapp.com.
Your photos and folders
StillView shows images from folders you open. It runs inside Apple's App Sandbox, so it can only reach the folders you choose. It displays your files in place and does not import, index, copy, or upload them.
The app keeps a list of recent folders, and it can restore your previous viewing session at launch. Both rely on security-scoped bookmarks, the macOS mechanism that lets a sandboxed app keep access to a folder you already chose. Those records live inside the app's container on your Mac, and you can clear the recent list from the welcome screen.
A few actions change your files, and only when you ask. Move to Trash sends a file to the macOS Trash, and the copy commands put an image or its path on the clipboard. StillView never modifies files on its own.
Photo metadata
The info panel shows the technical details embedded in an image file: camera, lens, exposure, dates, and GPS coordinates when the file includes them. StillView reads that metadata from the file on your Mac and displays it. It does not send coordinates to a map or geocoding service, and it does not build a database of where your photos were taken.
Clicking a row copies the value to the macOS clipboard, and only when you click. If you share an image, the file leaves with its metadata intact, as described under Network access.
AI Insights
AI Insights uses Apple's Vision framework on your Mac to identify visual categories, recognize text, and count faces. When an image contains suitable text, Apple's on-device Foundation Models framework can pick out the most useful lines. The app shows those lines without rewriting them, and the language model never receives image pixels. Visual matches can be incomplete or wrong, and they do not identify people. The feature requires a Mac running macOS 26 with Apple Intelligence turned on.
Everything stays on your Mac. StillView does not upload images, metadata, prompts, generated text, or results to any server, including mine. There is no cloud fallback: when the on-device model is unavailable, the feature is unavailable.
AI Insights is a preference, and you can turn it off at any time.
Preferences and local storage
StillView stores your settings with macOS user defaults: whether file names and the inspector show at launch, slideshow duration, the AI Insights toggle, automatic image enhancements, and similar choices. It also keeps window positions and a small number of automatic preference backups in its Application Support folder.
All of it lives inside the app's sandbox container on your Mac. None of it is synced, sent, or shared. Delete the app and its container folder in your user Library, and it is gone.
Network access
The app makes no network requests of its own. It has no analytics, no crash reporter, no update checker, and no advertising code. Anything that leaves your Mac does so because you asked, and another app carries it from there:
- Links to this site, GitHub, and vinny.dev open in your browser.
- The Send Feedback commands open a GitHub issue draft or an email draft addressed to stillview@vinny.dev. The draft pre-fills the app version, build number, macOS version, processor type, and whether AI Insights is on. Opening the GitHub draft sends that technical information to GitHub in the URL so it can display the form. You can edit the draft before you post it. The email command opens a draft in your mail app and does not send it.
- Share hands the original image file to the macOS sharing service you pick, such as Mail, Messages, or AirDrop. That service may send the file, including embedded metadata such as location, to the recipient or destination you choose, under its own privacy policy.
Anything you copy goes to the macOS clipboard, where macOS and the apps you paste into handle it.
The Mac App Store and Apple
Apple handles downloads and updates, and Apple's App Store privacy notice governs what the store collects. Two things reach me through Apple, and only through Apple:
- App Store Connect shows me aggregate statistics such as download counts. Apple anonymizes and aggregates them before I see them.
- If you chose to share diagnostics with app developers in System Settings, Apple may forward crash reports for StillView. They contain technical crash data, not your images or personal details, and you can turn that sharing off at any time.
Vision and Apple Intelligence are Apple's technologies. Apple's privacy policy describes how it handles on-device processing.
This website
stillviewapp.com is a static site hosted on Amazon Web Services. It sets no cookies, runs no analytics, and loads no advertising or social tracking scripts. I have turned server access logging off, so I keep no record of your visits. AWS processes the connection itself under the AWS Privacy Notice.
The site loads its typeface, Hanken Grotesk, from Google Fonts. Your browser fetches the font files from Google's servers, so Google sees your IP address and browser details for that request. Google's privacy policy covers it.
Links to the Mac App Store, GitHub, and X leave this site. Each of those services has its own privacy policy.
Children
StillView is not directed at children under 13, and it collects no personal data from anyone, of any age.
Your data and your rights
Because StillView collects nothing, I hold no personal data about you. There is nothing to access, correct, export, or delete, and no request I need to process. Your settings and folder bookmarks stay under your control on your own Mac.
If you email me or open a GitHub issue, I use what you send only to reply and to fix the problem you reported. GitHub's privacy statement applies to anything you post there.
Changes to this policy
If StillView ever starts handling data differently, I will update this page and change the effective date at the top. I will also note the change in the app's release notes. The current version always lives at stillviewapp.com/privacy.html.
Contact
Questions about privacy go to stillview@vinny.dev, or open an issue on GitHub. You can also read the source to check anything on this page.
The Terms of use cover licensing, warranties, and liability.